


The Iyat Mar Incident

by howelleheir



Series: The Fallen White Doors [4]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Backstory, Case Fic, Defective Vorta, Dominion fic, Feral Vorta, Gen, Horror, Medical Procedures, Mystery, Pre-Canon, Suspense, TFWD Standalone Work, Vorta - Freeform, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-25 23:13:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18711622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howelleheir/pseuds/howelleheir
Summary: [canonical to TFWD, but not part of the series.]In the fifteenth century on Kurill Prime, Heilan and Ishau, a pair of Vorta geneticists, have been assigned to an isolated temporary cloning facility. When a storm cuts off communication with the outside world, they begin to notice that they may not be as alone as they thought.





	The Iyat Mar Incident

Heilan glanced back over his shoulder at the steep path which led out of the jewel-bright forest of Iyat Mar to the temporary facility. The long hike back had warmed his skin in spite of the cold spring mist that hung in the air, and he stripped off his coat and wiped the sweat from his brow with his shirt-sleeve before continuing up the path.

The facility was built into an existing structure — a crumbling, ancient thing that had been uninhabited for 1600 years, since the Dominion's founding. It was large and sturdy enough to house the six hundred clones that had been transferred from Shi Mar until the new cloning facility could be built. The section of the building where they were being stored had been thoroughly retrofitted to accommodate their needs.

The living quarters were a different story. Heilan sighed as he pulled open the heavy wooden door and threw his coat and bag onto a chair.

From the kitchen, Ishau stuck his head into the wide vestibule which served as their sitting room.

“What's the verdict?” he asked, passing Heilan a glass of _lavna,_ which Heilan drained in a single drink before answering.

“The entire relay is out,” he said. “Looks like lightning struck it. I'll have to go back tomorrow and see if I can patch it up with what we've got. Until then, we've got no communication. And if that doesn't work…”

“It's a very long walk to Shi Mar,” Ishau finished, collapsing onto a cushion with a sigh.

“How are our supply levels?” Heilan asked after a moment.

“Lower than they should be. I noticed it this morning when I was refilling the pods’ nutrient drips.”

“Have you checked the clones’ metabolic rates?”

“It's not just the nutrient packs. We're missing some medical supplies, spare parts from the generator, a couple of liters of kava milk...I think Kabi's been getting into the storeroom at night.”

“You think _Kabi_ is stealing generator parts?” asked Heilan with a skeptical glance toward the sleeping zharatatha curled up in the window. She had hardly moved from that spot since they’d arrived, showing no interest in electrical engineering whatsoever.

Ishau shrugged. A debate over a handful of missing supplies didn't appeal to Heilan nearly as much as having a meal and a few solid hours of sleep before returning to work on the relay tower. He let the matter drop.

 

It was well into the night when Heilan woke from a fitful sleep to a strange noise — a high-pitched, distant whine. He reached across the bed to Ishau and shook him by the shoulder. “Ishau,” he hissed. “Ishau, wake up.”

“Hm?”

“Listen. What's that noise?”

Ishau sprang up with a half-coherent string of curses. “The stasis area - that’s the emergency signal.” He scrambled into the first clothing he could lay hands on, which happened to be Heilan's uniform.

Heilan glanced toward the wardrobe, but there was no time; Ishau was already on his way out the door, so he followed, wrapping his robe a little tighter around himself against the biting wind as he went.

They took the path that circled the building at a run, around into the courtyard between the living quarters and the storeroom until they reached the door that led into the main building. Ishau punched in his access code and the retrofitted glass doors slid open. The sound of the alarm was all but deafening. They climbed the stairs to Stasis with their palms pressed to their ears.

The alarm was coming from one of the pods closest to the door — its indicator light was flashing yellow. Heilan dismissed the alarm while Ishau tapped away at the panel at the end of the row.

“What's the problem?” Heilan asked, taking a step toward his colleague.

“It looks like that pod lost power, but I don't understand why it didn't take out the whole row. It's booting up now…”

Heilan bent down to inspect the connection between the pod and the row's power supply, but he didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until he placed his palm onto the floor to steady himself. The floor around the pod was wet with stasis medium, but there were no leaks that he could see.

“Oh no…” Ishau whispered.

Heilan turned. Ishau's hand was over his mouth, his eyes wide. “What's wrong?” asked Heilan.

“This clone is dead,” he said softly. It was always difficult to lose a clone in their care, no matter the circumstances, but especially one that was fully mature with no clear cause. Stasis couldn't have been interrupted for more than twenty minutes at the most — the clone shouldn't have died. “We'll need to do a causal analysis. Get a transport cart and help me pull him out.”

Heilan pulled over one of the steel carts from the far end of the stasis room. By the time he returned, Ishau had pivoted the pod into the horizontal position. With just the slightest hesitation, he reached out to lift the cover of the pod. Heilan braced himself as the seal released with a hiss. He wasn't eager to see a corpse.

“I...I don't understand,” Ishau said.

The clone wasn't dead. It was just _gone._ The pod was empty, the monitors and nutrient lines floating freely in the stasis medium. Heilan reached in, as if he might find the clone just under the surface of the medium, but his hand sank through straight to the bottom of the tank.

 

Heilan and Ishau never went back to bed. They took a few minutes to change into their proper uniforms, and then checked the status panels of each individual pod in the Gestation and Stasis areas. They found five more empty pods: one in Stasis and four in Gestation. As far as they could tell, whoever was removing the clones had rebooted the connection from the pod to the monitoring system so they could release the locking mechanism without tripping the alarm. It would have afforded them about three minutes to disconnect the power and override the access panel alarm, remove the clone, and put everything back in place before the system could reconnect and detect the power loss. This time, they must've missed the end of that window by fractions of a second — the power line had been reconnected when Heilan and Ishau had arrived.

By late morning, they were still in the lab piecing together a report when the facility’s internal comm system chimed to alert them to an access request at the main door.

They exchanged a wary glance as Ishau opened the line. The Vorta at the door smiled into the monitor. “Name, title, and department, please.”

“Fayun,” said the visitor. His voice was reedy and low, his serious tone an unnerving contrast to his pleasant expression. “Operations Oversight. Auditor. I'm afraid we weren't able to contact you to give advance notice. How long has your communications relay been down?”

“There was a storm five days ago,” said Heilan. “We think that's when it went out, but we only noticed the day before yesterday that it wasn't working. It should be operational by tomorrow.”

“If you'll give us a moment,” Ishau said, “we'll be down to let you in.”

As soon as the line disconnected, Ishau cleared his throat. “What do you want to tell him about the missing clones?”

Heilan hesitated. “It doesn't look good, does it?”

“No.” They stepped into the stairwell and descended toward the ground floor. “But it might look worse if we try to hide it. I'll leave it up to you, but for what it's worth, I think we should just say they died. Clones die all the time, but they don't often get _stolen_. Especially not from a secure facility in an unpopulated province.”

 

Fayun stepped inside as soon as the doors opened, giving a low hum as he looked around the lobby. “Interesting architecture,” he said. “But I'll bet the two of you will be glad when the new facility is built. Both of you worked at the Shi Mar facility before it was decommissioned?”

“Yes,” said Ishau. “I was in Development, and Heilan was in Special Projects.”

“Is that right?” he said. “Under Liran?”

“Yes,” said Ishau.

“And you,” he continued, gesturing toward Heilan, “would've worked for Weyoun.”

“Yes, briefly,” said Heilan. “He was moved to some consulting assignment — for Diplomacy, I think — just after I was assigned there.”

“It's a shame. I heard his work in genetic history was fascinating.”

“We have an example of that work here, actually,” Heilan said. “A zharatatha specimen. I can show you later, if you like.”

“Tell me something,” said Fayun, his voice suddenly losing the polite veneer of feigned interest in favor of something more genuine. “Is it true they think those little furry apes were _really_ what made first contact with the Founders?”

Heilan faltered, taken aback by the note of derision in Fayun's voice. “Well...yes. Of course, it's impossible to pinpoint an exact moment in our evolution — genetic reconstruction always involves a certain amount of extrapolation and guesswork, but—”

“Oh, I don't want you to think I'm questioning your competence,” Fayun interrupted. “I just mean that it's hard to believe _that's_ what we came from. You wouldn't happen to have continued that research in any capacity, would you?”

“No,” said Heilan. “The Founders decided to discontinue any research without a clear practical application.”

“Well, I suppose we can't create their vision of the future if we're too busy dwelling on the past, can we?” Fayun asked. “So...let's see a bit of that future.”

 

The rest of their day was spent combing through records and logs in silence broken only when Fayun found the occasional correction to make. It was the most thorough audit Heilan had ever been through — by the time Fayun stood and announced his intention to continue the next day, the white star had sunk below the treeline and the gold star was close behind, fading into a deep red horizon.

The three of them made their way back to their quarters and settled around the sitting room — climate control had not been a priority in that particular part of the building, but there was a large circular indentation in the stone floor that functioned well enough as a fire pit, so long as they kept the windows cracked and no one brought their glass of _lavna_ close enough to ignite, as Ishau had on their second night there.

Heilan filled three glasses and passed one to Ishau and another to Fayun.

“Oh, no thank you,” said Fayun with a raised hand. “I’m something of an oddity, I'm afraid. I find strong bitter tastes unpleasant.”

Heilan frowned. “Would you like something else?”

“If you have kava milk, I'll take that with water, one part each.”

With a polite smile, Heilan returned to the kitchen to prepare the odd drink. He discretely took a sip before bringing it back to Fayun, curious to see if it was as bad as it sounded. He may as well have drunk a glass of hot water while _thinking_ about a kava nut.

When he returned to the sitting room, Fayun and Ishau were deep in conversation, and Kabi had left her perch on the window to drape herself over Fayun's lap and soak up the warmth of the fire.

It was the first chance Heilan had gotten to really take in the stranger's features. He was tall and lean-limbed, with an uncommon shrewdness in his eyes. He spoke with the refined accent of the area — he was almost certainly born and educated at Shi Mar, a creation of Liran or one of his protégées. His distinctly delicate face reminded Heilan of Weyoun, as though they shared a common lineage.

Remembering the earliest days of his assignment in Shi Mar, Heilan felt uneasy. If Fayun was indeed of that particular stock, he would be difficult to lie to. He would root out every inconsistency, he would realize that the clones were missing, and the two of them would have to answer for it.

While Heilan had been worrying, the conversation had turned to sleeping arrangements.

“The bed’s a little small,” said Ishau. “But I think we could make it work for a few nights.”

“There are also a few spare cushions in storage,” Heilan offered, perhaps a little too insistently by the wide-eyed glance Ishau shot at him. “If you think you'd be more comfortable in here.”

“Yes, I think I'd prefer that,” said Fayun. “I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I don't like to sleep communally on assignment. You said 'storage’, I'm assuming that's in the other wing?”

Ishau nodded, getting to his feet with a groan. “If we all go, I think we could bring them back in one trip.”

They hurried along the path, hugging the building as they went to avoid the worst of the bitter wind that had picked up since dusk. As they turned the corner, there was a flash of light from behind the storage wing and a low rustling.

“Wait,” said Ishau, holding out his hand in front of the others. “What was that?”

“Lightning?” Fayun asked.

“No,” whispered Heilan. “It looked like...sometimes in the labs at Shi Mar, the zharatatha would get startled and emit a psionic burst. It looked like _that._ ”

Ishau turned to look back down the path toward the living quarters. “Did Kabi follow us out?”

Heilan's breath caught in his throat, and for a moment, he could say nothing. He couldn't even move. A few yards away, behind Ishau and Fayun, a figure had stumbled into the path, naked and pale and apparently as surprised to see Heilan as he was to see it.

The figure recovered first and sprinted away into the brush before the others could turn around. Heilan was sure he was the only one that had seen it, and doubly so when he saw his companions’ questioning looks.

“It wasn't Kabi,” he said. “It was a person.”

“A person?” asked Fayun. “This province is uninhabited.”

Heilan shot Ishau an apologetic glance. It would have been better if they’d made the decision together, but under the circumstances, he had no choice.

“Actually,” he said. “I don’t think it is. Yesterday, we noticed our supplies had been tampered with. And...last night, we found empty pods in Stasis and Gestation.”

Fayun’s eyebrows shot up. “And you didn’t think to _disclose_ —?”

“Not before we knew all the facts,” interrupted Ishau. “There were two hundred people assigned to the Shi Mar facility, and plenty of them aren’t happy about it being shut down. Any one of them could retaliate by trying to sabotage the new facility. Yourself included. We have no way of verifying your credentials, but you seem awfully familiar with the Shi Mar facility, even for an auditor. How do we know you didn’t come here to keep us occupied while an accomplice destroys more of our work?”

“I don’t think it’s sabotage,” Heilan blurted.

“Then what would you call it? Strangers breaking into the facility, stealing supplies and equipment, taking clones out of stasis, some that weren’t even mature?”

“What I saw,” he began uncertainly, “it wasn’t _normal._ It was naked, and it looked sick. Pale and dark around the eyes.”

“ _Uraita_ ,” Ishau laughed incredulously.

“Beg your pardon?” asked Fayun.

“You’ve never had a rural assignment, have you?” asked Heilan. “You wouldn’t know about them—”

“There’s also the fact,” said Ishau, “that they don’t exist.”

Heilan ignored him and continued, “My first assignment was in Shei’tal. It’s a small research town in Kourahamar. The people there had stories going back centuries about the Uraita. They’re supposed to be clones who escaped before being fully activated.”

“And you think that’s what’s happened here?” asked Fayun. “A series of...what? Spontaneous activations?”

Heilan shook his head. “That’s not possible. Not anymore.”

“You’ll forgive my ignorance; I haven’t been in the field in several years. Why wouldn’t that be possible?”

“Well, besides the fact that our equipment detects and corrects spontaneous activation, there’s been a change in protocol — it’s meant to reduce instances of defective clones and stabilize lines that might not otherwise be viable, but...any of our clones here couldn’t survive without being intentionally and fully activated.”

“Why?”

Heilan hesitated. He wasn’t certain that he was authorized to tell anyone, even an auditor, the details of the change. “Every clone produced in the past year and a half has a failsafe gene called ZTO-4. It reacts to proteins released during activation and causes a massive autoimmune response. There’s an inoculation given now after activation — it prevents the expression of the gene and reverses the initial cellular damage. Without the inoculation, the clone dies within days. We’re missing _weeks_ worth of supplies, things they would have had to take a little at a time, or we’d have noticed sooner.”

Fayun was silent for a long moment, staring off the way the figure had run. “Perhaps,” he said, “we should get back inside and reassess our situation in the morning.”

 

As exhausted as he was, Heilan couldn’t sleep. He kept turning the problem over and over in his mind. The clones couldn’t have spontaneously activated, couldn’t have survived beyond a few days. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have the intelligence to break into the facility even once, let alone what seemed to be many times over a period of weeks.

And yet, what looked to be an Uraita had stood right in front of him. Sickly-looking, but very much alive and definitely not the most recent clone to go missing. What would they need to survive without the inoculation? A blood transfusion might extend their viability for a day or two, but even with daily transfusions, organ failure would begin within a week.

No, he was certain what he had seen wasn’t one of their clones. It simply wasn’t possible. But that inference led to the problem of _where_ it had come from. The nearest facility was Shi Mar, and it had been out of operation for a year. Certainly, a Shi Mar clone could survive on its own — a year in the wild might explain its sickliness — and the close timing of Shi Mar’s decommissioning and the introduction of the genetic failsafe was suspect, but if they were dealing with one or more Shi Mar clones, where had _their_ missing clones gone?

His thoughts were interrupted as Kabi let out a shrill wail in the next room, followed by a rapid chirp. For the second time in twenty eight hours, he and Ishau sprang out of bed in the middle of the night. When they made it through the door, Fayun was also up, still in his uniform, his eyes locked on the window where Kabi sat, her fur standing on end, still chattering at something on the other side of the glass.

Ishau grabbed the heavy iron bar that fastened the door against the wind. The three of them rushed outside, eyes darting across the open field and the hills surrounding the facility. Fayun spotted them at the treeline and shouted a wordless warning.

Four figures like the one Heilan had seen, standing a few meters apart from one another at the edge of the clearing.

Hearing Fayun’s cry, the clones turned their heads in unison and seemed to see the three even where they stood obscured by the shadow of the facility. One by one, they took off into the forest.

Ishau was the first to spring to action, running down the hillside toward them.

“Wait!” Fayun shouted after him. “What _exactly_ are you hoping to accomplish?”

Ishau stopped in his tracks and turned, his face stony. “I’m putting a stop to this,” he said, and then disappeared into the trees.

“Ishau, come back!” cried Heilan. “Ishau!”

“Let's go,” said Fayun decisively, pulling two small handlights from his pocket and passing one to Heilan. “If we lose him in there we may never find him again.”

The two of them ran side by side through the trees, though Heilan struggled to keep pace with Fayun's long-legged sprint. They only paused intermittently to listen for the sound of footsteps and adjust their course, calling Ishau's name into the darkness. Then they were off again, the thin, low branches swiping at Heilan's skin, poorly protected by his robe, and the damp, uneven terrain biting at the soles of his bare feet, and the cold air burning in his lungs.

They were deep in the forest by the time Heilan's body refused to go any further. His plea for Fayun to wait came out of his mouth as a breathless, choked shout as he bent double, gasping for air, over a fallen trunk.

Just as Heilan lost sight of Fayun, a cry split the air not far ahead, and there was a bright flash of blue. A surge of adrenaline tore through Heilan, quieting the screaming protests of his muscles as he ran toward the sound. He was sure it was Ishau's voice.

The trees thinned out suddenly, a clearing and a stone ruin in front of them and two crumpled bodies on the ground, one naked and the other in a thin blue sleeping robe. Heilan rushed to Ishau while Fayun checked the clone.

Ishau was unconscious, but alive, an ugly burn over his chest. He stirred as Heilan checked for other injuries — nothing more than a few scratches and a badly sprained ankle.

“This one's dead,” said Fayun as he got to his feet. “We should head back, check Ishau over in the lab.”

“I'm alright,” Ishau said, just able to get himself off the ground with Heilan's assistance. “A few passes with the dermal regenerator and I'll be good as new. I want to look around in there.” Ishau pointed toward the ruin — it looked to be of similar construction to the facility, though more deteriorated — and stumbled toward it, using the iron bar as a crutch. “That's where they were going.”

“We really shouldn’t—” Fayun began, but Ishau shook his head.

“They’re not in there,” he said. “The other three ran off when that one collapsed. I didn’t see the one that hit me, but I think it’s safe to assume it followed them.”

Heilan followed close behind, and nearly knocked Ishau over when he froze just inside the outer wall of the ruin. Following his startled gaze, Heilan saw what had stopped him. On the cracked stone floor was another body, its torso neatly bisected by a surgical incision. As soon as he got close enough to see its face, he recognized it as the clone that should have been in the pod that triggered the alarm.

Ishau's brow knotted as he examined it. “There's no blood,” he said.

“Maybe it was moved, after...” said Heilan, indicating the wound, but Ishau shook his head.

“There should still be _some_ pooling in the body. Look at this.” Ishau pointed to the crook of the arm — needle marks. “Someone drained this clone's blood. And…”

Carefully, Ishau pulled back the skin around the incision.

“He's missing about half of his internal organs. I'd be willing to bet if we take that other dead clone back to the lab, we'll find at least some of them inside it.”

Heilan blinked. “You think someone tried to treat its activation sickness by... _harvesting_ from our clones?”

“If they couldn't access the inoculation,” Ishau reasoned, “Or if they didn't know about it. It's new enough — our friend the auditor didn't even know it existed.”

Satisfied with his examination of the clone, Ishau stood and pointed to an intact door on an inner wall. “That's a retrofit. Made with a field replicator.”

The door was secured only with a chain that Ishau easily broke with the iron bar. Behind it, a makeshift laboratory — some of the equipment was clearly made with a field replicator like the door, but most of it had come from the facility, a great deal of which they hadn’t yet noticed was missing.

“No stretcher or transport cart,” said Ishau. “Do you think the two of you could carry that clone outside back to the facility if you did it together?”

 

Outside, Heilan moved to help Fayun lift the body, but he waved him away. “I don't need help,” he said.

Heilan and Ishau stood slack-jawed as he lifted the clone from the ground and slung it over his shoulder. Noticing their faces, he laughed and said, “My progenitor was in Discontinuation and Disposal. Physical strength is in my genetic code.”

The return trip was slower than their panicked sprint through the woods had been, Ishau leaning heavily on Heilan. Fayun was only slightly hindered by his burden, but every so often, he came to a halt, listening for sounds in the distance. It appeared that the remaining Uraita had not circled back; the forest was silent and still.

Once they had finally made it back to the facility, Fayun carefully laid the body out on the examination table while Ishau prepared his equipment. In the stark light of the lab, several things immediately caught Heilan's eye: first — the hair, grown out from the standard cut, told him that the clone had been out of stasis for at least a month. Second — surgical incisions, one across the abdomen, another down the center of the chest, and fresh needle-marks in the arm. Blood transfusions and organ transplants — crude, certainly, but expertly performed. Third — the clone couldn't have been made in any official facility. Genetic variation was tightly controlled and any specimen with even subtle physical defects was discarded. This one appeared to have fully intact reproductive organs. Even Heilan's work with Special Projects had never gone so far into prohibited territory; there was no way _that_ had been sanctioned by any facility director.

It only deepened the mystery — the improvised facility had enough equipment for the surgeries and transfusions, but not to do the kind of intensive design work that it would have taken to reverse-engineer a reproductively intact Vorta.

Heilan chewed his lip as he watched Ishau begin to work, taking tissue samples in silence. Fayun blanched and swallowed audibly when Ishau made the first incision across the clone's chest. Heilan couldn’t blame him; it was difficult to watch a body be taken apart, even the clearly deformed body before them. It still _looked_ like a Vorta.

Once Ishau had exposed the internal organs, the extent of the clone's illness became clear. The smell of necrotic flesh permeated the room. The heart, still sutured into place, was visibly inflamed and the lungs and stomachs were marbled with a brownish-black discoloration. Catastrophic failure across every system.

“It definitely had the failsafe gene,” said Ishau. “This is the result of untreated activation sickness.”

“Is that what he died of?” asked Fayun.

“I won’t know without a more thorough examination,” said Ishau. “But if I had to guess, I’d say its heart failed under the exertion. They were running fast, and it was septic. I’m curious about something — hand me an inoculation.”

Fayun turned to the cold-storage cabinet behind him and pulled out a prepped cartridge, which Ishau took along with one of the sample dishes to the microscope, and set it to display on the screen above the counter.

“Even in dead cells,” he said, “we should see positive changes in the structure of the interstitium once the inoculation is introduced.”

“What’s the point?” asked Heilan. “We _know_ it had the gene.”

Ishau looked back to the body. “They have developed reproductive systems, advanced psionic abilities, and they could see us at a distance in the dark.”

“Of course,” Heilan breathed. Twisting open the cap of the cartridge, Ishau let a few drops of the inoculation flow into the dish. On the screen, the cell walls disintegrated.

“I don’t understand,” said Fayun.

“Their defects,” Heilan offered. “Sensitive vision, psionic ability, sexual function — any _one_ of those could have come from any of a dozen different gene expressions, but _all_ of them are only possible if MYSh-1 is present and active. It was a dormant gene, but it had to be removed, because when it’s present in a ZTO-4-positive clone, the inoculation doesn’t just inhibit ZTO-4’s expression, it activates MYSh-1 and causes a catastrophic cellular breakdown. This clone would have died with or without the inoculation.”

Fayun nodded slowly. “So, the rest of the clones…”

“They won’t be a problem much longer,” said Ishau. “We’ll put the facility on lockdown for a few days. Wait them out. If they come back, we can use the inoculation. It’ll kill them almost instantly.”

“That’s a good idea,” Fayun said. “Well, if the two of you don’t mind, I’m very tired, and I’d like to get some sleep before I give my report to the Sector Overseer. I’ll leave first thing in the morning. Oh— Don’t worry about the report. Given the circumstances, the loss of the clones can’t count against you.”

“You’re welcome to stay in our quarters,” said Heilan. “We’ll have to stay here to lock down this section. Without communications and remote monitoring, it’ll need to stay sealed for at least the next five days, until we’re sure they’re all dead. You...you wouldn’t be able to leave if you stayed in here.”

“Take this,” Ishau added, handing him the iron bar. “Don’t want them getting through the door while you’re alone.”

Fayun smiled.

“Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you both.”

 

Just as the white star was breaking the horizon and throwing soft beams of light onto the floor through the protective grates on the windows, and Heilan had begun to stir from where he’d slept on a triage bed, the comm system rang. Not an internal page. The comms for the relay tower.

He jumped up and ran to the console.

“This is the Iyat Mar temporary facility,” he said. “Go ahead, please.”

“Hello, this is Kilana, Systems Security Administrator,” said the voice on the other end.

“Kilana!” he gasped. He knew her; she had run security for the Shi Mar facility. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear your voice. It’s Heilan.”

“Heilan? I should’ve known _you’d_ be the one to break my comm relay,” she teased. “How did you get it back up and running? We tried everything remotely, you’ve had no security monitoring at all for six days.”

Heilan stammered. “I- I didn’t do anything. I don’t even understand how it could have come back online, the receiver was hit by...well, we thought it was lightning, but we’re not sure. We’ve been on lockdown. There was a breach, just before the auditor arrived.”

“Auditor?”

“Yes, Fayun. He actually may be getting ready to _walk_ back to Shi Mar now, so if you access our PA system, you could probably catch him—”

“You’re not scheduled for an audit,” she said sharply. “Give me a moment; I’m scanning your perimeter.”

“What’s going on?” Ishau whispered, looking half-awake and wincing as he limped over to the console. The regenerator had healed the sprain, but he’d be stiff and sore for a few more days.

Heilan gestured for him to be quiet, as if the rapid tapping of Kilana's fingers on her console might tell him anything about what she was seeing.

“There’s no one there,” she said after a moment. “Just you two in the main building. I don’t see your intruder anywhere, even on the expanded search. If he left on foot this morning, he’s awfully fast. I’ll set up an alert for your feeds and call if anything comes up.”

“Thank you,” said Heilan, though he doubted she would find anything. Fayun had probably left as soon as they’d locked down the main building.

“Wait,” Kilana said. “It looks like your pet got out. I’m reading its life signs about six kilometers northwest of your position.”

Heilan and Ishau shared a silent glance. That was the position of the ruin in the forest.

“Can we— Are we clear to end the lockdown?”

“Yes,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “Come straight back, and copy me on your report when it’s finished. I want to know every detail about whoever’s out there posing as an auditor, poking around a secure facility.”

“Of course.”

 

On their way to the ruin, they took a brief detour to the comm relay. There were broken, scorched components all around its base like someone had been replacing them and just discarded them on the ground. And, indeed, when Heilan popped the access panel open, all the right pieces were there, and the status indicators were blinking in the default pattern. He would have to replace the panel and the lock, but Fayun had fixed what Heilan now suspected he himself had intentionally broken.

Satisfied with one mystery solved, they headed to the ruin.

“Kabi!” Heilan called, bending down to look into holes in the stones where she might be hiding.

“Heilan, come here!” Ishau called from inside the outer wall.

“What is it?”

His question was answered when he rounded the corner. The bloodless body was gone, and in its place, a patch of loosely mounded dirt. A grave. In the sunlight, it was clear that there was another, a few meters behind the fresher one. Another of their missing clones.

“Why did he bury them?” Ishau asked.

Heilan chewed the insides of his cheeks, baffled at the strangely archaic practice. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get Kabi and go.”

Both of them gave a start as soon as they opened the door to the improvised facility. Three bodies in a neat row on the floor. Each wrapped tightly in a blanket with an empty inoculation cartridge on the ground next to them. Kabi lay by their feet, as though she were keeping watch.

“He knew where they were,” said Heilan absently. “In the lab. When you asked for an inoculation.”

“He’d already taken them. Before he found out it would kill them. There’s a full cartridge on the table. Once he knew he couldn’t cure their activation sickness...”

“He euthanized them,” Heilan finished.

Ishau gave a little gasp, his eyes going suddenly wide. “There were four of them,” he said. “The one in the lab, three here.”

“So?” asked Heilan.

“There are _two_ buried outside. We were missing two from Stasis and—”

“—four from Gestation!” Ishau finished, the solution dawning on him. “He was making these clones in the facility.”

They took the path at a run, Heilan holding Kabi to his shoulder and wondering if they would make it back before one of them collapsed from exhaustion, but they reached the facility, flew through the doors to the main building and took the stairs two at a time to Gestation.

Heilan tapped quickly at the panel of the row closest to the door, setting the first pod to open for examination while Ishau donned a pair of gloves. The pod tilted, its lid released, and the translucent gestation medium drained away. The clone inside was small, perhaps half-grown, its chest rising and falling slowly in time with the whirring respirator over its face. Ishau performed his examination quickly, then shook his head.

“Defective,” he spat.

Heilan's heart sank as it became apparent that the next clone also shared the same diagnosis. And the next. And the next. By the fourth, Ishau had stopped even announcing it, he just reset the pod and moved down the row.

There were two hundred pods in use on that level, and they opened every single one and examined every single clone, and in every single case, they found the same thing: the clones had all been tampered with. Some of them were new, created in the last month, but some were eighteen months old, fully mature and ready to move into stasis, which meant that Fayun had started his work at Shi Mar.

Ishau’s face contorted, his cheeks flushing, until he finally couldn’t hold in his anger. “What’s the point?!” he shouted, a clenched fist slamming into a worktable at the end of the last row.

Heilan could only shake his head. In the last months at Shi Mar, there had been rumors — some defective researcher performing unauthorized experiments, continuing the work in genetic history and creating clones with prohibited traits — but this went well beyond an experiment.

For whatever reason, the man who had called himself Fayun had altered two hundred clones, given them the MYSh-1 gene, some in Shi Mar after most of the staff had been reassigned, most here where there was only a staff of two to watch over the clones. It was only after they’d all been changed that he started to activate them and realized they were dying.

Two hundred clones, a full third of their charges — gone.

Even if there was a way to save them from activation sickness, they’d never be allowed to live with their defects.

Ishau and Heilan, numb from shock, got down to work in silence. There was no need to discuss what was to be done; they had no choice, no alternative, and to speak about it was more than either of them could bear.

They disabled the alarms, turned off the main breaker for the level, and slid down the wall and sat on the floor, looking out over the room.

One by one, row by row, the pods’ backup power failed and the lights went out.


End file.
